Why Fiction?

I love reading and writing fiction. Though not amazed by the numbers who don’t, I’m bothered by the responses I get when I tell them my writing/reading preferences.

As a retired Federal Law Enforcement Officer I’m expected to be telling tales of cases, my own and those I’ve researched. Giving the sordid and amusing details of the crime. When I tell then, no, I make shit up, I get looks one might get lifting weights to Barbra Streisand’s Evergreen.

What did I do? I hemmed and hawed and felt my face go flush. I hid my writing Jones, which is no way to get published.

What will I tell them now, after suppressing and hiding my true bent? This.

Fiction is where we live and thrive. It is our motivation. It is our escape from days of quiet desperation.

How much of your day is spent “in the moment?” Reviewing that blueprint, sitting a 2AM surveillance, studying those financial records? And in the moment how often do you take a flight of fancy? Winning the Pritzker Architectural Prize, catching a Top Ten Fugitive, and wherever it is financial statements take you?

No one just plays the lottery, or places a bet. We win. And we win big. For those days, hours, minutes in wait, we create a spending list that goes on and on. We share with family. We donate to charity. We get happy. Then, of course, the numbers come in, your horse doesn’t, and the Cowboys don’t beat the spread. Ah, but do we quit, come back to reality? Hell no, we rinse and repeat. We might be on the lounger watching that soccer, baseball, or basketball game, but really, we’re right in the thick of it with a winning goal, walk-off homer or buzzer beater bucket. We are not so much the spectators that psychology has pegged us to be. Oh no, look in the eyes. Behind that wild stare we are on that stage, that field, that court. We are just begging to be.

And why not? We’re all just kids in our minds, and fiction is the life blood of childhood and adulthood. It’s how we got from there to here. It’s the road that takes us back when things break down, and they always break down. It’s where we go when real life, that nonfiction world we live in, overwhelms us.

About that nonfiction, regardless of what journalists and historians embrace, it doesn’t exist. All is just fiction based on fact. Perceptions passed down and along. From the moment it occurs, the event is pure fiction, open for interpretations and conjecture. Who saw what, when? Capture it on video for replay and review it a dozen times, does it give consensus? Tell that to Raiders’ fans concerning the “Tuck rule” that gave the New England Patriots a victory in the 2001 playoffs.

History books are large, to cover the magnitude of the ages. They are also dusty, owing to their sparing usage. PBS is magnificent but unless it’s a Ken Burns documentary viewers don’t flock to it. Even the History channel is served by a niche market. The past is interesting because it has concluded, but the future is wonder that entices us in the moment it is being created.

I take nothing away from “nonfiction” writers. It’s grueling research. Their skill comes in taking a period in time and making it larger than life, which, by the way, is the intent of fiction. They must give clarity and significance to an event or events we can’t alter, unless a fiction writer creates an alternative history piece. They have no access to things outside the historical record of dates and letters, unless someone like Michael Shaara creates the Gettysburg historical novel, Killer Angels. What I wouldn’t give to known George Pickett’s thoughts on receiving his orders to charge his men into oblivion. Without those elements history falls flat, an old piece of yesterday hardly worth dusting off.

I’m sure there’s a whole psychology behind it. Fiction may be that quiet place we go to escape and dream. Few go to a history book or biography or memoir to find themselves. They look inside. The characters written about and read, we become if they fit our fiction we have of ourselves. We search for answers there, in quiet places.

Are we lazy, scared, unwilling to face the truth and reality? I argue against that. In most cases we don’t live there long. Just long enough to read 100,000 words, watch a 90 minute love story, or a two hour ball game. We return home but always ready and willing for more adventures.

Why fiction? It is where we live; it is life unbounded.